Portable devices, such as mobile phones, tablet devices, digital cameras, multimedia devices, and other types of computing and electronic devices can include a camera device that is utilized to capture digital images. Some camera devices are designed as a dual camera system having two imagers, with camera lenses and image sensors, and can be implemented for a synthetic optical zoom and/or digital zoom. Some digital camera devices lack the optics for optical zoom and rely on digital zoom to zoom-in on a subject of a scene. Other digital camera devices do have zoom lenses for optical zoom, but apply digital zoom automatically once the optical zoom limits of the lenses have been reached.
Generally, optical zoom allows a user to mechanically vary the focal length of a camera lens, thus changing the angle of view when zooming-in or zooming-out on a subject of a scene as viewed through the lens. The range of optical zoom for a camera lens is limited by the longest and shortest focal lengths of the lens. Typically, digital zoom can be utilized after the optical zoom of a camera lens has reached its longest focal length limit. The digital zoom is then accomplished electronically without adjustment of the camera lens optics. However, no optical resolution is gained because an image is cropped-down to a zoomed-in area with the same aspect ratio as the original image, resulting in poorer image quality than would be achieved with optical zoom.